Who is Eddie Campbell? While he is arguably
best known for being the artistic half of the Alan
Moore graphic novel, From Hell, Eddie is also
accomplished through his own publishing endeavors.
Bacchus, the adventures of the Greek god of
wine, a longtime Campbell fixture, will end with
book ten. With his longest-running creation now
put to bed, Campbell has turned to a slew of new
projects. In June, Campbell will release a new
installment of his autobiographical graphic novel
series entitled After The Snooter, and July
will see the launch of Eddie Campbell's Egomania,
a new magazine featuring strips, essays, and
interviews all written (and drawn) by Campbell.
Slush's Dan Epstein sat down with Eddie to talk
about his past, his future, and From Hell, the project that took
Hollywood by storm.
[A special thanks goes out to Top Shelf's Chris Staros]
Dan Epstein: What made you start the Alec
autobiographical books?
Eddie Campbell: I grew up drawing comics. That
came natural to me. But by 1979 I didn’t really
follow comic books. I was reading a lot of
autobiographical literature like Henry Miller and Jack
Kerouac. I just naturally fell into doing it in comic
books. Anytime I tried to write prose it comes out
sounding like someone else’s. For instance, I just
started a new work. I had planned to write a prose
book on the history of humor from the beginning of the
world. I was going to do it as a textbook but I found
that some of my ideas were so preposterous that they
only worked when coming out of the mouths of little
comic strip characters. I think I draw comics by
default. I realized that over the years it seems
like we commit ourselves to the job that we are going
to do for the rest of our lives so early on, that we
are not aware we’ve done it. Every time I try to go
sideways into another area it doesn’t work. I always
end doing it as a comic. It has become my natural mode of
expression.
I had this idea of doing something autobiographical
and it came out as a comic. It was only later that I
discovered American Splendor by Harvey Pekar.
That first came out in 1976 and I started doing my
books in 1979. That book hadn’t yet gotten to England.
DE: Where were you living at the time?
EC: I was living in Southend, which is near London
right on the river Thames.
DE: Which is more satisfying: the fiction or the
autobiographical stuff?
EC: The autobiographical books are what I enjoy
doing the most. That’s what I want to be remembered
by. So I’ve got three of the Alec books out right
now, Three Piece Suit, The King Canute Crowd
and How to be an Artist. I’ve just about sent
the fourth one to the printer. It's called After
The Snooter.
DE: Why don’t you use your real name like
Pekar or Joe Matt?
EC: It's one of those things I did at the start and
I’ve just stuck with it. When you do fiction you can
change the names and everybody is safe. What hadn’t
occurred to me when I started was that I was going to
be drawing people and then they can be identified by
their likenesses. I was faced with this contradiction
right from the start. I've finally dropped that and I don’t
actually change the names. Now I realized it was
pointless because everyone can recognize themselves
anyway because the drawings are usually pretty
accurate. Originally my impulse behind it was that I
was fond of characters and the people that I knew and
I wanted to get them down on paper with all their
gestures, funny mannerisms and habits exactly.
DE: Do you use reference photos?
EC: I do it from memory and then refer to photos. TThe challenge is in the struggle to bring that character
to life. To get how somebody stands, leans or holds a
cigarette is all from memory. I’ve got no time for
the usual comic book way of doing everything.
I was in college in England with Brian Bolland in the 1970’s. Brian had these idealized figure types. For instance, later he'd be drawing pictures of Judge Hershey and Judge
Anderson [from the Judge Dredd comic book] and
they looked like the same girl except they had
different hair colors. But that’s the comic way to
do it, which is not fundamentally wrong. That goes
back to classical art where all figures were idealized
types. With Greek statues the way you identified which
god it was supposed to be was by its attributes. Like
Zeus will have a thunderbolt, Poseidon will have a
trident but otherwise they look the same. And in comic
books the only way you can tell one comic book
character from the other is by the costume or Thor’s
hammer.
DE: How hard is it to phase back and forth
between autobiography and fiction? Will you start one
work and not stop until it’s done?
EC: I’ve always got three or four things going at
the same time, which is a necessity. I have to make a
living at this. I always pace it so that something
that is paying is going on at the same time as work
that isn’t paying. Lately I’ve been able to
indulge myself because of the From Hell movie. We just
keep selling the From Hell books so I’m just making
a living by continually reprinting the book. Which
means I can casually indulge myself. The danger is
that I’ve probably lost contact with economic reality but I’m
writing the best stuff I’ve ever written.
I’m putting a new magazine out. Its called Egomania.
I’ve just finished putting it together and I’m
feeling totally depressed. That happens with every
work. You think it’s a work of genius then you take
it to the photocopy shop and suddenly it doesn’t
live up to your expectations. It’s not the work of
genius you thought. I went through it with From Hell
too. They keep giving it awards and I keep shaking my
head in disbelief. Somebody wrote on the web the other
day that it’s a flawed piece of work and I thought,
“Oh fuck, they found out.” [laughs] It’s the
beginning of the end, they found out. No need to tell
me where the mistakes are, I know where the mistakes
are. I’m just waiting for them to be found.
But back to Egomania. I did the Bacchus
comics up to issue 60 but by the end Bacchus wasn’t
even in it anymore. It had become a magazine where I
did my little autobiographical comics and I did
articles and things, whatever interested me at the
time. I think in the last issue I wrote an eight-page
article called "Alan Moore’s London" where
we showed some of the photos Alan had taken. We ran
little oddball articles. Somebody described it as like getting a newsletter from a secret society.
DE: What made you decide to do the Bacchus books?
EC: Well, way back in 1986, I had to do something
that had to make money. Because up until then I had been
doing autobiographical books and they were coming out
in little volumes from Escape Publishing in England
which is long gone. I had a weekly comic strip in Sounds,
the English rock music paper. It was called Rodney
- The Premonition, the story of the man who blew
up the world. But they threw us out, Phil Elliott and
me, because this little rock paper had this idea that
a comic strip should continue from week to week
against the wisdom of newspapers all over the world,
which leaned away from that. These people had this old-fashioned idea. So I desperately had to find something
that made money. Well, I did.
My idea was to do an American-style action comic
that could sell. A black and white comic because at
the time black and white comics were huge because of
the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the most
amateurish-looking comic. I thought, “I could do
that, I could do an amateurish-looking black and white
comic. I could be rich too.” So the first few issues
were action oriented, with the gods beating each other
and the Eyeball Kid shooting electricity from his
fingers. Later it became much more philosophical and
satirical, a heady mix of different things. It was originally to be ten but I'm combining books seven and eight into one volume as they are both shorter than usual. It will be titled Eyeball Kid: Double Bill.
DE: How did you come up with Bacchus’ unique
face?
EC: Well, Bacchus is the god of wine. I was
thinking of a raisin. A grape, when it is young, is
smooth, round and shiny. When it ages, it dries in the
sun and becomes mangled looking. I thought that would
be the state of the god of wine when he gets to four
thousand years old.
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